A "structured" interview (SI) developed by Rosenman and Friedman is generally regarded as the most accurate method for assessing the type A/B behavior pattern, which has been shown to be a significant risk factor in coronary heart disease (CHD). Two of the primary drawbacks of this method are the subjective nature of the scoring or typing procedure and the high costs of training reliable scorers. A major purpose of the proposed project is to enhance the objectivity of the scoring procedure, contribute to the standardization of the interview schedule, improve its predictive power, and reduce its cost. The results of three previous studies indicate that very objective speech variables such as volume, response latency and speech-rate together account for about 50 percent of the variance in conventional, inteview-based behavior typing. However, subjective impressions or only moderately reliable instruments were used to measure the speech variables. In the proposed project we intend to use a very reliable, automated procedure that has been developed in our laboratory for the measurement of such speech variables. In one study, we wil compare a group of coronary patients and an appropriate control group, in terms of their temporal speech patterning (including response time and speech-rate), volume, and a numbe of othe computer-scorable speech variables that have not been previously explored. All these variables will be derived from SIs administered to he above patients. The same variables will also be derived from an unconstrained conversation between the experimenter and the patients, in order to determine whether it, too, can predict BPAT and/or CHD. A second study, with college students as subjects, is designed to assess the importance of the stress-inducing techniques used in the SI, such as interviewer interuptions, and the dragging out of questions in eliciting Type-A behavior. The results of these studies should clearly demonstrate the feasibility of automated scoring of Type-A behavior.